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Three years after launching Google One, Google Cloud nears enterprise readiness with Anthos

Google Cloud’s enterprise journey started with Diane Greene and the ‘One Google’ strategy

When Google entered the public cloud market it leveraged the company’s
positive reputation among developers as well as technological expertise around
machine learning and data analytics from its Search business. However, as a
cloud vendor, the company had yet to establish a reputation or a business model
that appealed to enterprises. Customer engagements were largely disjointed as G
Suite and Google Cloud Platform were sold by different sales teams, making it
cumbersome for enterprises to adopt multiple offerings within Google Cloud’s
portfolio. To attract and win enterprise customers, Google Cloud hired Diane
Greene as CEO in 2015 and created its “One Google” enterprise strategy in which
Google Cloud planned to unify its SaaS and PaaS offerings in sales and
engineering. Greene’s experience as the co-founder of VMware made her
particularly qualified to lead the new strategy, but she was unable to
establish the business messaging that large enterprises seek. However, Google Cloud’s
value proposition to enterprises has improved over the past three years under Greene’s
leadership with a degree of portfolio integration and technology advancement in
areas such as machine learning, analytics and Kubernetes.

Over the past year Google Cloud’s momentum has continued to accelerate: Thomas Kurian was appointed CEO, the
company partnered with large vendors such as Atos and introduced Google Cloud
Services platform, which included hybrid capabilities with Google Cloud’s GKE
and its new managed on-premise private cloud, GKE On-Prem. While many of these
developments were noteworthy on their own, Google Cloud’s Anthos Platform,
announced at Google Next in April, brings together the vendor’s technological
advancements and partnerships, as well as new capabilities and infrastructure
agnosticism that truly appeals to enterprises.

At its core, Anthos is a rebrand of Google Cloud Services Platform, a
multicloud management toolset first announced in July 2018. In addition to GKE
On-Prem’s general availability through Anthos, Google Cloud also launched
Anthos Migrate, which enables customers to manage workloads running on Amazon
Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure. Anthos Migrate automates the migration
of virtual machines from on-premises or cloud environments into containers in
GKE, which helps simplify migration to Anthos.

The ability to migrate from — or run
workloads on — AWS and Microsoft IaaS in
addition to Google Cloud Platform (GCP) is vital to Google Cloud’s enterprise
strategy, as 30% of enterprises plan to increase the number of IaaS providers
in their hybrid environments over the next two years, according to TBR’s 2H18 Cloud Infrastructure & Platforms
Customer Research. Further, enabling these organizations to containerize
legacy applications on premises in Anthos helps alleviate virtual machine
maintenance and OS patching pain points for enterprise IT departments.
Migrating to Anthos also enables customers to leverage offerings such as Google
Cloud AI in GCP while keeping certain workloads on premises, which is
particularly beneficial for organizations facing corporate, government or
industry regulations.

Because Anthos is a completely software suite, customers can deploy it
on their existing hardware rather than replacing on-premises assets with new
infrastructure. For customers that have existing hardware or plan to buy
additional infrastructure, Google Cloud hardware partners such as Cisco, and
hyperconverged infrastructure partners including Dell EMC, Hewlett Packard Enterprise,
Intel and Lenovo are making their offerings compatible with Anthos, enabling
customers to configure or purchase the underlying hardware based on their
storage, memory and performance requirements.

IBM’s Kubernetes-based IBM Cloud Private offers a similar value proposition, but Google Cloud’s expertise in Kubernetes may help fend off competition from IBM, as well as Microsoft and AWS

Google Cloud’s most formidable competitor regarding Anthos is IBM and
its Kubernetes-based PaaS offering IBM Cloud Private, which is gaining traction
in the market as evidenced by the vendor’s 200 customer signings in 4Q18.
Additionally, IBM’s tenure as a trusted enterprise provider makes the vendor a
favorable choice for many organizations. However, IBM is also seen by many
enterprises as a legacy on-premises provider, whereas Google Cloud is a
born-in-the-cloud business with a strictly cloud-oriented business model. In
the public cloud market, Google Cloud is growing at a faster rate than IBM,
showcasing Google Cloud’s superior perception in the market. In addition to its
improving perception among large enterprises, Google Cloud can leverage its
reputation among developers to outcompete IBM in the small- to medium-enterprise
space.

AWS’ Amazon Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes and Microsoft’s
Azure Kubernetes Service are Kubernetes-based PaaS offerings similar to GKE,
but the on-premises capabilities for each offering lag behind those of Anthos.
Azure AKS will become available on Azure Stack, but the plans to create Azure
AKS on Azure Stack were just announced in February. Amazon EKS can connect to
Kubernetes apps running on premises, but the capabilities are more limited than
those of Anthos as AWS has not yet developed an Amazon EKS on AWS Outposts. TBR
expects Google Cloud will be able to fend off competition from IBM, AWS and
Microsoft, as Google Cloud — as the
inventor of the technology and with a network of more than 20 ISV partners with
Kubernetes apps in the GCP Marketplace — has a
prowess that may help swing customers in its favor.

Strong investments by webscales and China-based telcos will carry the telecom infrastructure services (TIS) market through the COVID-19 crisis relatively intact, with a shallow decline of relatively short duration expected in the overall market followed by a robust, sustained recovery as CSPs in other key countries accelerate their infrastructure initiatives to align with the new […]

Strong investments by webscales and China-based telcos will carry the telecom infrastructure services (TIS) market through the COVID-19 crisis relatively intact, with a shallow decline of relatively short duration expected in the overall market followed by a robust, sustained recovery as CSPs in other key countries accelerate their infrastructure initiatives to align with the new […]